Art on the back: 1968

First of all, RIP to former Yankees legend Ralph Terry, who passed away last week. He shared his thoughts on baseball cards with this blog in 2019.

On to the 1968 edition of Art on the Back. As in 1967, Topps went with a vertical format on the back which gave little room for the cartoon. Unlike previous years, Topps did not make the cartoon about the player, but instead made it part of a trivia question about a team. The questions were pretty much the same for each team (what led the team in HR last year, what is the capacity of their stadium, who is their manager, when did they last win the pennant, etc). It was probably a good way for young fans to learn the recent history of baseball, but it did not make for the most interesting cartoons as the same subjects are repeated over and over. 

Here's one that's pretty typical, but the World War One soldier with the Red Sox last World Series victory made me chuckle.

This one is a bit confusing. I get that Milt Pappas is the best pitcher on the team, hence the "Ace" tattoo. But why is he holding a bat? (It's not like he was a good hitter for a pitcher; he hit .097 in 1967.) I wonder if the cartoon was originally meant for someone else.

I've mentioned the "whitewashing" of Black players a few times. Most Blacks were whitewashed, like Don Wilson. An exception seems to have been made for Ferguson Jenkins, but the cramped space made the cartoon come out rather poorly.

Whoever owned this card before me took it upon themselves to color in Tommie Agee.

I wonder what Bill White thought of the cartoon of a player getting hit from the stream of a fire hose on the back of his card. That would have been a rather provocative image in 1968.

There were a few other cartoons that stood out to me, though not as many as in '67.